President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education has created a crisis that critics long feared: leaving marginalized students vulnerable to misconduct with little federal intervention. A new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan arm of Congress, paints a damning picture of how mass layoffs and the slashing of resources at the agency have significantly impacted the civil rights of students. 

The department’s chief responsibility is to ensure that all students have equal access to education. However, its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) dismissed roughly 90 percent of the more than 9,000 new complaints of discrimination based on race, sex, disability and age it received from March to September 2025, the GAO found. This has raised concerns that Trump’s Education Department is systemically refusing to investigate civil rights cases instead of reviewing their merits — abandoning the students it is tasked with protecting. 

The fact that the agency shuttered seven of its 12 regional civil rights offices and placed half of OCR personnel — 299 out of 575 staffers — on administrative leave last year contributed to the dismissals of most complaints. They were prohibited from working while on leave, adding to the backlog of cases. The move was costly for the students who appealed to the agency for help and also for taxpayers since covering these employees’ salaries and benefits during their nearly nine months of leave amounted to as much as $38 million, according to the GAO.  

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent who caucuses with Democrats and serves as ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, commissioned the GAO report. He criticized the department for wasting taxpayer dollars and preventing Office for Civil Rights staff from investigating claims. “That is unacceptable,” he said in a statement following the release of the findings.

“Every child in America should be able to get a good education no matter where they live, what their religious beliefs are or whether or not they have a disability,” he said. 

The Education Department did not respond to The 19th’s request for comment about the report before publication.

For students with disabilities, their families and advocates, the GAO’s findings send a chilling message about the likelihood that they will receive a quality education. Historically, these students have filed the largest subset of civil rights complaints, with self-described “mama bear” parents typically fighting for their access to education.

“There’s just not enough capacity to do the work that OCR has been charged to do,” said Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc of the United States, a community-based organization advocating for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families. “And what we’re seeing from families is just their complaints going into a black hole and not being responded to. They’re not able to get in touch with somebody. It’s quite concerning to us.”

Limited OCR oversight, she argued, removes a key mechanism for uncovering systemic problems, such as improper seclusion and restraint methods for students with disabilities. Often, these troubling practices only surface after multiple complaints have been filed. With the OCR path effectively closed, families face the financially daunting prospect of hiring an attorney to uphold their children’s rights.

“If the only way a parent can get their child’s needs met is by suing the district and assuming the risk of tens of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees, most parents can’t do that,” Neas said.

She also questions the administration’s repeated goal of moving education “back to the states,” given their uneven record on educating students with disabilities.

“The reason we have a federal special education law was that states specifically barred children with disabilities from the public schools,” she said. “For our kids, the federal protections were what opened up the schoolhouse doors.”

Jolene Baxter knows that fight all too well. The Oklahoma City mother of a third-grader with physical and cognitive disabilities has had to advocate for her daughter’s access to education throughout the 9-year-old’s life. Schools have tried to turn Marlee away, arguing there was no space for her, Baxter said. And after two students recently knocked the little girl down, she said, Marlee was moved out of the specialized class where she once thrived, a development Baxter considers an injustice.  

She has never filed a complaint on behalf of her daughter at the federal level but has done so previously at both the local and state levels. She fears what the federal government’s inertia on civil rights complaints could mean for students with disabilities.

“I just feel like it just trickles down,” she said. “It sends the message to schools at the local level that they don’t have to take the concerns of parents seriously.”

The Office for Civil Rights has been perennially understaffed. It has a backlog of thousands of cases, some dating back to George W. Bush’s presidency. Since Trump returned to office last January, it has only resolved 32 cases related to Title IX, a law that bars sex discrimination in schools, according to a recent study by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.

Since Trump returned to the White House, OCR has not resolved any complaint of sexual assault, sexual harassment, gender harassment or denial of benefits, or a single case of pregnancy discrimination. Instead, the civil rights office has focused on investigating cases involving transgender students, which the office itself initiated.

“There are a ton of sexual violence cases from over a decade ago that were still in the backlog, and this Department of Education didn’t touch any of them,” said Jessica Lee, co-director of WorkLife Law and a co-author of the recent study. “So it seems to me that their goal is using Title IX for their own purposes and not to bring justice for these students who have asked for help, which is just appalling.”

Lee explained that their team’s findings are based on the resolutions that OCR posts publicly, but those reflect only a fraction of cases brought before the agency. “The thing that our research is missing, of course, is what is happening to the complaints before they’re reaching the point of investigation,” they said. According to the GAO report, most cases are dismissed from the start.

“It sounds like they are going through the motions, or they have put in place some completely different standards of review than what we’ve seen in the past decades,” Lee said. “It’s just stunning. I don’t know how they can work through that many cases and if they’re actually paying attention to the details, which is what they should be doing. It sounds like their goal might be to just shut things down rather than actually pursue justice.”

Students with disabilities are more likely to be victims of sexual violence. Because of that, their complaints may overlap, encompassing special education and sexual misconduct alike.  

Both Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon have been accused of sexual misconduct, and Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse. 

“If they valued justice for the survivors of sexual abuse, they would not be doing what they’re doing now,” Lee said. “It’s clear as day. It’s written in the numbers.”